This disclosure relates methods to compensate dynamic wavelength dependent attenuation induced signal distortion of fiber Fabry-Perot interferometric (FFPI) sensors. More particularly, it relates to using signal processing methods to calculate dynamic wavelength dependent attenuation and further compensate the signal of FFPI sensors. There are several mechanisms that can cause dynamic wavelength dependent attenuation on fibers such as hydrogen darkening, macro bending, water absorption and so on. In this disclosure, hydrogen darkening induced attenuation is used as an example to demonstrate the invented methods.
Fiber optic sensors are attractive for harsh environment applications due to their distinguished advantages including good high-temperature capability, corrosion resistance and electromagnetic insensitivity. Nowadays oil and gas application has increasingly adopted fiber optic sensors to monitor producing zones and take actions to optimize production. Fiber cables with a length from 1 km to 10 km are deployed in wells. These fiber cables can be sensing elements themselves for some applications like distributed temperature sensing (DTS), distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) and distributed stain sensing (DSS) or serve as waveguide to transmit the signal of some point sensors such as Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) based sensors and FFPI based sensors. It is known that hydrogen diffusion into optical fibers results in the attenuation of the light being transmitted, which is pervasive in oil and gas well environment. This attenuation degrades the sensing performance, so a lot effort has been taken to mitigate the hydrogen darkening by adjusting the dopants in fibers [1,2] and optimizing the cables designs [3-5]. However all these methods only mitigate the hydrogen darkening but cannot intrinsically exclude the attenuation, especially for long deployment length (up to 10 km) and/or high temperature (up to 300 C) applications. As a result, it is necessary to compensate the hydrogen darkening in the interrogation system. For example, dual-laser interrogation systems are used to compensate for hydrogen darkening in DTS applications.
There is a need then to compensate for the spectral distortion that occurs in Fiber Fabry-Perot sensing systems due to hydrogen darkening.